Thanks Scrapper, you curtailed most of my rant bitching about my ruined Saturday, Sunday, and Monday Night Football watching. I am watching College football and this idiot kills himself, his girlfriend and all of these DUMABASS football pundits, specifically Jason Whitlock and the dumass Bob Costas, talk trash about gun culture. Anyway, the typical "arrggggh we live in a time of gun culture," "arrrgggh if we didn't have guns everyone would live blah blah blah." Fuckers ruining my football weekend.

That's what I hear every time people can't build a logical argument. It is funny because I agree with quite a few things anti-gun people suggest. They can never do it in an eloquent fashion and ALWAYS go overboard.

Here are the shows that I bring up, when people talk about violence being new:
Gunsmoke (1955–1975)
The Rifleman (TV Series 1958–1963)
Bonanza (TV Series 1959–1973)
The Lone Ranger (TV Series 1949–1957)
Rawhide (TV Series 1959–1965)
The Cisco Kid (TV Series 1950–1956)
Have Gun - Will Travel (TV Series 1957–1963)

Many of these shows were KID SHOWS. KID SHOWS. Hell, lets not talk about all the War Propaganda based movies.

I hear you. It's just that Huckabee made the same complaint about Costas messing up his football with his sanctimonious crap (and no, I don't listen to Huckabee).

Now that you mention it, there were a lot of war movies, westerns, and violent historical pictures in the 50s, too. Not to mention cartoons. And kids played with toy guns a lot more often. Even when I was a kid, in the late 60s and 70s, we always had cap guns and toy machine guns.

Do you notice one major difference between the stars of the "gun culture" of the 50s and 60s and of today that might explain why the Bob Costas-types are more aware of the danger? Hmm.

"They," may be blaming Katrina, but the numbers suggest "they," should be thanking Katrina.

The overall murder rate (I think Scrapper's numbers are firearm-only) in Louisiana averages 12/100000 for the years 1998-2011; 2005 (year of Katrina) is an outlier, the only time since 1969 murder has dipped below the 10/100000 mark.

To be fair, 2007 is another outlier, presumably in which returning murderers play catch-up, the rate hitting above 14/100000.

And lo, Kano looked down upon the field and saw the multitudes. Amongst them were the disciples of Uesheba who were greatly vexed at his sayings. And Kano spake: "Do not be concerned with the mote in thy neighbor's eye, when verily thou hast a massive stick in thine ass".